Director of national intelligence: Spying debate ‘probably needed to happen’

The United States director of national intelligence said at a conference in Washington on Thursday that the leaking of classified documents by former government contractor Edward Snowden kick-started discussions in America that until then were overdue.

At a trade show in the nation’s capital, DNI James Clapper said
that the stream of top-secret national security documents that
have been steadily released by Snowden since early June
encouraged a debate that should have occurred earlier.

“As loathe as I am to give any credit for what’s happened
here, which is egregious…” Agence France-Presse quoted
Clapper, “I think it’s clear that some of the conversations
that this has generated, some of the debate…actually probably
needed to happen.”

According to AFP, Clapper said that “perhaps” a debate
regarding the balance between the government’s spy powers and
Americans’ privacy should have occurred sooner, and added, “So
if there’s a good side to this, maybe that’s it.”

The remarks marked the first time that Clapper — the commander of
all 16 US intelligence agencies — even remotely applauded
Snowden’s leaks, which in a matter of merely three months have
sparked internationalprotests, congressional hearings, lawsuits against the White House and calls for
reform, among other action.

Clapper could go back to condemning Snowden soon, though: during
his statements this week, the DNI said of the leaks,
"Unfortunately, there is more to come.”

The Washington Post, the New York Times, the Guardian, ProPublica
and others have all published in part classified files attributed
to Snowden that have since the first disclosure on June 5 exposed
the inner-workings of America’s vast surveillance apparatus,
masterminded by the National Security Agency often under a cloak
of utmost secrecy that has only begun to be rolled back by recent
media reports based off of those documents.

Glenn Guardian, the Guardian reporter who has disseminated leaked
documents supplied by Snowden, said previously there the trove of
classified information he was provided with contained “dozens” of
newsworthy scoops. The Times has reported that Snowden gave
reporters roughly 50,000 documents which, according to Clapper,
are still being scoured by journalists for potential news pieces
that are still to come.

Prior to Snowden’s first leak, Clapper told a congressional panel
in March that the US does not wittingly collect any type of data
on huge swarms of American citizens. Two weeks after the Guardian
and the Post began publishing leaked documents—including those
contradicting the DNI’s claims — Clapper issued a formal apology to Senate Intelligence Committee
Chairwoman Dianne Feinstein (D-California) to say sorry for his
“clearly erroneous” statement.

The Department of Justice has charged Snowden with espionage and other crimes and
has asked him to come back to the US to stand trial. He fled
America before the first leaked documents were reported on and
has since taken refuge in Russia upon receiving temporary asylum.

Earlier this week, Greenwald and the Guardian published a NSA
document that had until then gone unreported. In it, the US
intelligence office is said to be sharing raw data pertaining to Americans with
colleagues working for Israel’s spy agency, suggesting again that
the US is not just collecting domestic data, but distributing it
among allies for analysis reportedly without perfect privacy
safeguards.

The results of an Associated Press/NORC Center for Public Affairs
Research poll released this week reported that a majority of
Americans remain opposed to an array of NSA programs exposed
by Snowden.